What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2023-46842: x86 HVM hypercalls may trigger Xen bug check
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 8.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2024-05-16 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-843
Description
Unlike 32-bit PV guests, HVM guests may switch freely between 64-bit and other modes. This in particular means that they may set registers used to pass 32-bit-mode hypercall arguments to values outside of the range 32-bit code would be able to set them to. When processing of hypercalls takes a considerable amount of time, the hypervisor may choose to invoke a hypercall continuation. Doing so involves putting (perhaps updated) hypercall arguments in respective registers. For guests not running in 64-bit mode this further involves a certain amount of translation of the values. Unfortunately internal sanity checking of these translated values assumes high halves of registers to always be clear when invoking a hypercall. When this is found not to be the case, it triggers a consistency check in the hypervisor and causes a crash.
Affected products
- Fedoraproject Fedora: 38, 40
- xen: from 3.2.0
References
- https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-454.html
- http://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-454.html
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/D5OK6MH75S7YWD34EWW7QIZTS627RIE3/
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/RYAZ7P6YFJ2E3FHKAGIKHWS46KYMMTZH/
- https://xenbits.xenproject.org/xsa/advisory-454.html
Get alerted when CVE-2023-46842 or the next vulnerability affects your stack